Hegemony, as used in this analysis, refers, in the Gramscian sense, to the corpus of ideas, beliefs, and values representing the collective ‘commonsense of the epoch’. In this sense the corpus of ideas, beliefs, and values of the US power-elite, encompassed within the realist paradigm of national security, was successfully globalised by the post-war US foreign policy through its varied instruments of persuation and subversion. Never before in history, including within the Cold War global system, there existed a hegemonic power. But there were multiple tiers of contests for dominance within it: for example, between the realist paradigm and the collective security paradigm, each representing its corpus of ideas, beliefs, and values in their respective institutions; after the marginalisation of the UN system, between the ideological divide of the Cold War era; and, between them and the nonaligned, as also between the North and the South. It was only at the end of the Cold War that the United States emerged as the hegemonic power within the global system pursuing the interests of its power elite as its ‘national interest’, with implict primacy within the pecking order of the global system.

Conceptually, hegemony ought to be clearly distinguished from dominance, whether military, economic or technological. Dominance involves actual or threatened use of coercion; while hegemony assumes willing suspension of disbelief within the collective against the superior virtues and interests of the hegemone.